The Recovering Heart: Emotional Sobriety for Women

INTRODUCTION

What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.

—DEMI MOORE,

actress, Harper’s Bazaar interview, 2012

Loneliness. Fear. Self-doubt. Self-criticism. These feelings lie at the heart of the shadowy inner world of many women today—even women who seem to have it all. Regardless of how successful we may appear to others or how much we’ve accomplished in our lives, we’re often our most determined detractor, our most unforgiving critic.

We might catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror and think, I look old and tired. I look fat. Or we lose a job through no fault of our own and tell ourselves, I’m a failure. I can’t do anything right. Perhaps our marriage ends or we yell at our children and we conclude, I’m a terrible person. I don’t deserve to be loved.

For women in recovery from addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, and compulsive behaviors, this painful self-criticism goes even deeper. Our life experiences have led us to question our own value, to deny our fundamental worth as a human being. Many of us were subjected to some sort of trauma at a critical point in our development, often at the hands of someone we trusted. Trauma damages our core sense of self and fills us with shame.

Our addictions inflicted new traumas: fractured relationships, public and private humiliations, and lost opportunities. On top of all that, we bear the stigma of being a woman with addictions.

All addictions carry some degree of stigma, whether the addict is male or female. But a greater stigma is attached to women. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, there are about 18 million alcoholics or problem drinkers in the United States.¹ By some estimates, about a third of them are women. Yet Al-Anon membership is overwhelmingly female. (Al-Anon is a mutual support group for friends and families of problem drinkers.) Shame surely plays a role in men’s reluctance to publicly acknowledge and seek help for the problem of an alcoholic partner.

We can also see the stigma of female addiction in the public’s response to celebrities with substance abuse problems. Consider the well-publicized struggles of actors Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. Many people seemed to regard Sheen’s antics as nothing worse than the hijinks of a notorious bad boy. Lohan, on the other hand, garnered widespread ridicule for her many failed attempts to get clean.

As one alcoholism counselor put it, A man who falls down drunk is still a man, but a woman who falls down drunk is a tramp. The double standard was also observed by the late Carolyn Knapp, who wrote in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story, A messy drunk’s an ugly thing, especially when it’s a woman.²

For women with addictions, the stigma becomes part of our self-identity, further damaging our already shaky emotional inner world. Our fear and our pain and our shame saturate the very core of our being, shaping our decisions, coloring our relationships, and defining who we think we are—sometimes even after years of living clean and sober. But that’s hardly surprising, especially when we think about women in recovery within the broader context of womanhood today. Traditional and modern interpretations of femininity have been at odds for generations. In the mid-1800s, women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony wrote, Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother. A century later, First Lady Bess Truman observed, A woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight.

Since then, the emergence of feminism and the entry of millions of women into the workforce have given us a sense of empowerment that our grandmothers probably never had. Still, like generations of women before us, we are bombarded with confusing and contradictory messages about our value to society. It can sometimes feel as though womanhood itself is under attack.

On one hand, we are expected to be nurturing, pleasant, and wholesome (hence the stigma for female addicts). On the other hand, pornography permeates our culture and degrades the value of women. We are expected to be chaste and at the same time sexually proficient. We are told it’s our minds, not our bodies, that matter, yet we are judged by our physical attractiveness. We are taught that we are men’s equal, yet violence against women remains an ugly fact of life for millions of us. We are the breadwinner or partial breadwinner in our families, but women still are not equally compensated for doing the same work as men. Arguably, our central role in mainstream society remains that of homemaker and mother.

In this minefield of conflicting messages, is it any wonder why so many women struggle to develop a healthy sense of their own worth? For women in recovery, who have spent years numbing and running away from difficult emotions, the task is even harder. We have used alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, sex, codependence, and other substances and behaviors to avoid and distract ourselves from the wounds at our core. We have little or no practice with confronting painful feelings in ways that contribute to our personal growth.

Our early days of recovery provided yet another avenue of escape from upsetting emotions. We were physically and mentally stressed, and we focused all our energy on staying clean and sober, one day at a time. And rightly so. Abstinence is the goal of early recovery. Little else can be achieved without it.

But as time passes and we become more secure in our recovery, long-buried feelings inevitably emerge. Wounds from the past are still deep inside us, unexamined, untended, and unhealed. The harm we have done to ourselves and to others is waiting to be acknowledged, understood, and mended.

At this point some of us are tempted to relapse, to retreat to the familiar numbing comfort of substances or compulsive behaviors. This is understandable. Nothing has prepared us for the difficulty of confronting painful memories head-on. We never learned how to face the source of our anger and grief and remorse or to fully feel our emotions. We are frightened by what has hurt us in the past and uncertain of our ability to cope with it.

Yet personal growth requires us to stop running and start engaging in the process of facing our emotions—not so we can wallow in pain or relive the trauma, but so we can move beyond it and become our healthy, authentic self.

Most of our ideas about who we are—whether we call ourselves good or bad, strong or weak, worthy or unworthy—come from our feelings about ourselves. These feelings, which begin in infancy and develop throughout our lives, determine our understanding of who we are. And who we think we are—how we see ourselves—influences every choice we make, from our choice of education and career to our decisions about relationships and self-care.

That’s why emotional healing is so powerful. Personal growth cannot happen without it. Until we untangle the web of hurtful and damaging emotions that prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly, we will continue to suffer from our secret belief that something is wrong with us. And that belief will prevent us from achieving our full potential or recognizing our true value as a unique, worthwhile person.

The Twelve Steps are not only a path to freedom from our addictions, they also offer guideposts to emotional healing, gently leading us to higher levels of understanding and self-awareness. Professional therapists also offer support and guidance. Good therapists let us explore our emotions at our own pace and in our own way, understanding that emotional healing cannot be rushed. It unfolds differently for every woman.

This book is offered as a companion for your journey, not to provide answers—those you will discover for yourself—but to suggest avenues of exploration and to share the experiences of others on the same path. At the end of each chapter you’ll find several journal questions. These are meant to stimulate ideas to write about or discuss with a trusted mentor or therapist. Use them only to the extent that you find them helpful.

Ultimately, the journey of emotional healing is deeply personal—and it is the work of a lifetime. Our search for our own truths and our own meaning, once begun, never really ends, because the accumulation of experience and knowledge cannot help but affect our understanding of ourselves and others. The way we think about something at the age of thirty is likely to be different by the time we reach sixty.

Nevertheless, as we acknowledge, examine, and come to terms with the feelings we have tried so hard to run away from, we can begin to free ourselves of old, negative misperceptions about ourselves. We start to see ourselves more clearly and to recognize our own strengths, values, and virtues.

As our wounded heart begins to heal, we take our first small, courageous, wonderfully liberating steps towards self-acceptance, personal fulfillment, and spiritual wholeness.

1

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

—ALICE,

in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

One bright Saturday morning, my friend Meg and I were taking a walk around our neighborhood. It was one of those perfect spring days when puffs of white clouds sail through the sky and a warm breeze stirs the green-gold trees.

I love spring. Something about the hopefulness of it makes me happy. But that day, I could tell Meg was troubled. Normally a lively and talkative person, Meg seemed quiet and sad. I’m not very good company today, she muttered after a while.

I asked if something was bothering her.

She gave a little sigh. I was looking through some old photos last night. I don’t know why. Masochism, maybe. I found one of me and my mom I’d forgotten about. I’m about six and we’re on the beach and I’m glaring at the camera like I’m pissed off at the world. She shrugged. I don’t know. It reminds me what a miserable brat I was.

Oh, Meg! You had your reasons.

Yeah. She was a terror, that’s for sure. But at least she didn’t end up losing her kids. She gave a pebble an angry kick. I mean, what kind of piece-of-crap mother does that?

I stopped and looked her in the eyes. A mother who’s hooked on pills and alcohol, I said firmly. A mother who’s lost her way. But look how far you’ve come.

She kicked another pebble and fell silent again as we resumed walking.

Meg’s life looks good on the outside, but she’s struggled emotionally for years. Her mom had been harsh and verbally abusive, her dad abandoned the family when she was eight, and she had her first child at seventeen after a drunken sexual encounter she barely remembered. Still, Meg earned a college degree and built a solid career in hospital administration. By the time she was thirty-five, she was married to a nice guy and had two more kids and a lovely house. She went on great vacations and wore pretty clothes and drove a new car.

She was living the American dream—except for an addiction to alcohol and benzodiazepines (tranquilizers) that she managed to keep hidden for years.

I didn’t know her then, but Meg says that when she crashed, it was ugly. Her temper became explosive and her moods swung between rage and despair. She lost her job. Her husband divorced her and won custody of the kids. David, the youngest, said he was scared of her.

At the age of forty, she was living in a women’s shelter and asking herself how it had come to this. But Meg’s a fighter, and slowly she climbed out of the hole she’d fallen into. By the time we met, she’d been in Twelve Step programs for years. I know her as a warm and compassionate woman who has worked very hard to mend her relationship with her children. Meg has a nice condo and loves her job as a manager in a doctor’s office. She also has a side business making jewelry, a talent she discovered only after she got clean and sober.

Still, there are lots of days when Meg doesn’t like herself very much.

We all make mistakes, I reminded her as we walked. But you learned from yours. You changed. I think that’s something to be proud of.

I know, she nodded. I know it up here. She tapped the side of her head. But inside, I’m still the bad little girl. I’m still the bad mother.

I knew what she meant. I’ve experienced it myself. I can put on a good game face and present myself as confident and capable when I need to. I can look like I have it all together. But deep inside, a voice sometimes says that something’s wrong with me. That if people knew the real me, they’d reject me.

Lots of women I know feel the same way. Between our external and internal worlds is a nagging disconnect, as if our accomplishments and decency are not as real as the flaws inside us. As Meg puts it, I know in my head that I’m a good person. I know I have a lot of strengths. That’s the thinking part of me. But the feeling part of me doesn’t believe it. In my heart, I’m still an undeserving, worthless person.

Where do these feelings come from? How do we come to see ourselves as fundamentally unworthy human beings? And what’s the difference between who we really are and who we think we are?

To understand the role our experiences play in how we see ourselves, we have to go back to our earliest childhood. That’s when we begin to develop a sense of our own identity.

THE EMERGING SELF

We all come into this world needing safety and security. We need to know that we’ll be fed when we’re hungry, cleaned when we’re soiled, and protected and comforted when we feel threatened or are in pain. Long before we can express our needs with words, we instinctively cry, babble, and smile to attract the attention we need.

As newborns, we have little sense of ourselves as individual beings. Instead, we exist as an extension of our primary caregiver—most often, our mother. This initial bond is so powerful that many psychologists believe it sets the stage for our emerging sense of self and for the quality of our future relationships. If we’re lucky enough to be in the care of someone who responds with consistency and sensitivity to our needs, we form a secure attachment to that person.

Secure and Insecure Attachment

For healthy emotional growth, children need to develop secure attachments with others: that’s the idea of attachment theory. The child’s attachment to the primary caregiver is the most important. The mother or mother figure gives stability to the child’s world. The child can always turn to that person for protection and comfort.

From this nurturing base of secure attachment, toddlers feel safe enough to explore their world. They start to gain independence and satisfy their curiosity, knowing they have a safe haven to return to. In other words, healthy dependence promotes healthy independence and the self-confidence that comes with it.

But that curious toddler still needs her mother. In fact, separation anxiety in young children is a sign of healthy attachment. When a mother leaves and an infant or toddler cries, that’s a sign of deep attachment to her. Gradually, children learn to trust that their mother will return and comfort them. They come to expect that things will work out. They relax, their self-confidence grows, and a sense of optimism takes root.

But what if the mother doesn’t provide the comfort and security her child